Striking resemblances that will never
fail to perpetuate the tenderness of friendship, to divert the cares of
absence, and to aid affection in dwelling on those features and that image
which death has forever wrested from us.

Charles Fraser, Charleston Times,
May 27, 1807

A major exhibition
of American portrait miniatures, an art form that flourished from the mid-eighteenth
to the mid-nineteenth centuries, was at the Yale University Art Gallery
from October 3 through December 30, 2000. Love and Loss: American Portrait
and Mourning Miniatures includes close to 140 of these exquisite works
of art, most of them small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, as a few
large easel paintings that show how these intensely personal images were
worn as jewelry. Visitors will not only be able to appreciate the charm
and beauty of the miniatures, but also to examine their construction and
learn the engaging, often poignant, stories behind them. Works in the exhibition
are selected from Yale's outstanding collection of American portrait miniatures,
along with a promised bequest and some important loans, Robin Jaffee Frank,
associate curator of American paintings and sculpture, organized the exhibition
and wrote the related book. She and a team of diligent Fellows have been
tenacious in their search for the identity and background of both sitters
and portrait painters. They have rescued them from anonymity and, in the
process, provided the viewer and reader with intriguing anecdotes and revealing
historical information about private life and society in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century America.

After its showing at Yale the exhibition travels to the
Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC (February 10 - April 8, 2001) and the
Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, MA (April
27 - July 31, 2001).

A young bride on her deathbed, George Washington as President,
Martha Washington in widowhood, an alluring seductress, ships' captains,
their lonely wives, and children separated from their parents by distance
or death are some of the individuals portrayed in miniature in this exhibition.
These intimate portraits were painted on commission to commemorate births,
engagements, marriages, deaths, and other unions or separations. Combining
painting and decorative arts, portrait miniatures were most often painted
in watercolor on thin disks of ivory, housed under glass in finely worked
gold lockets, brooches, or bracelets. A decoratively arranged lock of the
sitter's hair might be displayed on the reverse side, frequently intermingled
with the hair of the person who commissioned the portrait. Indeed, hair,
which survives time and decay, was often chopped up or dissolved to paint
mourning miniatures.

"The miniature's rise in popularity in the North American
colonies in the mid-eighteenth century," noted Ms. Frank, "coincided
with a greater cultural emphasis on romantic love, marriage, and affection
between parents and children. Depictions of people wearing miniatures,"
she continued, "eloquently testify to the personal and social significance
of these tiny mementos." Portrait miniatures were so much a part of
upper-, and later middle-, class American life that they became a specialty
of such artists as James Peale,, John Ramage and Edward Greene Malbone as
well as a number of anonymous journeyman miniaturists. The exhibition also
includes miniatures by major easel painters, including the only one made
by Benjamin West, as well as works by John Singleton Copley, and Charles
Willson Peale.

At the entrance to the exhibition the visitor viewed the
miniaturist's tools -- a work desk, brushes, paint box, a reducing glass,
component parts and cases ·-- and learned how these skilled, frequently
self-taught, artists constructed these tiny, fragile objects. A video projection
showed rotating miniatures enabling the viewer to see all sides of magnified
works. From there, the exhibition was installed chronologically, beginning
with The First American Miniaturists: Experiments in a Secret Art,
which focused on Benjamin West's sole effort, accompanied by a video presentation,
and works by Charles Willson Peale and John Singleton Copley.

After the peace of 1783 portrait miniatures of military
leaders and statesmen were extremely popular and in the section Miniatures
and the Young Republic were small, crisply modeled images produced for
this growing audience. A particular focus here was The Cult of Washington,
where likenesses of the Founding Father, both as a public figure and-private
man, were displayed in all manner of cases from pendants to a snuff box.
The national grief at Washington's death inspired an unprecedented display
of portrait and allegorical miniatures worn by men, women, and children
well into the nineteenth century. This led to a wider market for mourning
miniatures, met by artists like Samuel Folwell, who fashioned commemoratives
for the expanding middle class market.

The turn of the nineteenth century saw a burgeoning demand
for miniatures of all kinds and scores of miniaturists came to America to
satisfy it. The Flourishing of the American Miniature focuses particularly
on the romantic tokens that served as surrogates for the absent loved one,
as well as to express a secret passion. Exhibited were numerous miniatures
by members of the Peale dynasty -- James, Raphaelle, Anna Claypoole, and
Charles Willson -- and double portraits of married couples. Particularly
delightful are William Doyle's alluring Young Lady in a Sheer White Dress
and the provocative Beauty Revealed (Self-Portrait), miniaturist
Sarah Goodridge's limning of her own breasts, a secret gift to statesman
Daniel Webster.

During the Jacksonian. era, members of the prospering middle
class joined the market for portraits. By then, Americans were just as inclined
to frame a miniature or hang it on the parlor wall as to wear it in a locket.
Soon, a greater transformation came with the invention of photography at
the end of the 1830s. Miniaturists met the competition by mirroring the
meticulous qualities of the photograph in watercolor-on-ivory portraits,
painted from or aided by a photographic image. It was not long before the
photograph eclipsed the miniature as the primary means of expressing love
and loss in portable form.

The exhibition closed with a group of mourning miniatures
-- rings, brooches and lockets -- in a section titled Not Lost but Gone
Before. A highlight in this section was the miniature Harriet Mackie
(The Dead Bride) the subject of one of several video commentaries. "By
revealing the story of her life and death, we return to this miniature,
its power to move us," said Ms. Frank. "More than any other token
of the time, the mourning miniature expressed the universal longing to keep
the dead within the circle of the living."

A beautifully illustrated 362-page book, Love and Loss:
American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures, accompanies the exhibition.
It traces the development of this exquisite art form revealing its close
ties with the history of American social and private life. The book is published
by the Yale University Press.

The exhibition and publication were made possible in part
by The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc. and a grant from the National Endowment
for the Arts, a Federal agency. Additional support came from the Virginia
and Leonard Marx Publication Fund and the Mrs. Lelia Wardwell Bequest. Conservation
was supported by the Getty Grant Program. The Yale Art Gallery is indebted
to Davida Tenenbaurn Deutsch and Alvin Deutsch Esq, Yale L.L.B. 1958, for
the timely promised bequest of their distinguished collection of American
miniatures, which significantly enriched the exhibition and publication.
Crucial loans came from Gloria Manney, Leonard Hill, the Gibbes Museum of
Art, Charleston, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Maryland Historical
Society, the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, and the New York Historical
Association, Cooperstown. Artists' tools were lent by the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston, the New-York Historical Society, the Stamford Historical Society,
and the Winterthur Museum.

About the Curator

Robin Jaffee Frank, Associate Curator of American Paintings
and Sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery since 1995, received her
Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale in 1994. She received her B.A., summa
cum laude, with highest honors in both Fine Arts and English and American
Literature, from Brandeis University in 1977. At Brandeis. she was named
a Louis Dembitz Brandeis Scholar for the highest academic achievement in
the Creative Arts, elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and awarded a Thomas
J. Watson Postgraduate Fellowship to study the production of documentaries
on the visual arts under the direction of the BBC-TV in London.

Ms. Frank gained experience with exhibition organization
by working in contemporary art galleries from 1979 to 1983 and as a researcher
for a Lucas Samaras Photography Retrospective held at the International
Center for Photography, New York, in 1983. As a graduate student at Yale,
she was the recipient of a Marcia Brady Tucker Fellowship in 1986 and The
Hcnry Luce Fellowship in American, Art in 1988-89. As a curatorial intern
in the Art Gallery's department of Prints, Drawings, and Photography, she
organized "The Good Old Summertime: American Prints and Drawings, 1850
to 1910" in 1986, and with Richard S. Field co-authored the exhibition
catalogue American Daguerreotypes from the Matthew R. Isenburg Collection
in 1989. Since she began curatorial work in the Department of American Paintings
and Sculpture, she co-authored A Checklist of American Sculpture at Yale
University in 1992; contributed essays on American Impressionists to
A Private View: American Paintings from the Manoogian Collection in
1993; and organized the exhibition and authored the catalogue, Charles
Demuth Poster Portraits: 1923-1929, the subject of her doctoral dissertation,
in 1994. In addition, Ms. Frank played a major role in the realization of
many other exhibitions and publications, and temporarily assumed the role
of department head from October 1997 to September 1998 while Helen .A. Cooper
served as the Art Gallery's acting director. Ms. Frank has lectured on American
art at Yale as well as at the National Museum of American History, the Whitney
Museum of American Art, the Frick Art Museum. and New York University. She
recently organized the major exhibition, Love and Loss: American Portrait
and Mourning Miniatures. She also has authored two articles on miniatures.
The Dead Bride (The Yale Journal of Criticism, Spring 1998)
and Miniatures under the Microscope (Yale University Art Gallery
Bulletin, Fall 1999).